Recipe | Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting

Months ago, I made a foolish promise to bake all the cakes featured in my first novel (as yet unpublished), Art and Soul. You can see the other cakes that fall in this category on my Sweet’s Cakes page.

This week I took another step to keeping my word by making carrot cake!

This recipe comes from Mary Berry’s Traditional Puddings & Desserts. However, I did change some of the ingredients. Her recipe has wholemeal flour and muscovado sugar. I changed this so I could use what I had in the cupboard. I also used my own cream cheese frosting recipe.

However, all credit to Mary Berry because I never would have thought of putting banana in a carrot cake; it’s a brilliant idea! I feel I have to underline this because the final product does taste of banana, so if you’re not fond of this ingredient this particular carrot cake recipe isn’t for you. Please note this cake also contains walnuts.

Ingredients (makes 2, 20 cm/8 inch circular cakes)

150 ml (0.25 pint) vegetable oil (sunflower oil, etc.)

250 g (8 oz) self-raising flower

2 tsp baking power

150 g (5 oz) light demerara sugar

60 g (2 oz) chopped walnuts

125 g (4 oz) grated carrot

2 ripe bananas, mashed

2 eggs

1 tbsp milk (I used full fat milk)

Frosting/icing ingredients

300 g icing sugar

50 g butter/margarine at room temperature

125 g cream cheese

Method

Grease and line your tins. I used two, 20cm/8 inch circular tins. You could use a large rectangular tin. It’s up to you.

Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees C/ Gas Mark 4/ 350 degrees F.

Measure all your ingredients into a large bowl and mix together until well blended. At this point I want to mention my beautiful new Kenwood mixer (birthday and Christmas present!) which made light work of this.

Divide your mixture evenly between you tins and bake for about 50 minutes. It sounds like a long time but it doesn’t burn, trust me. You can check if your cakes are ready by inserting a sharp knife into the centre of them. If the knife comes out clean then your cakes are done.

Leave the cakes to cool in the tins, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Make your cream cheese frosting by mixing together the ingredients above (have I mentioned how much I love my new mixer? I used to do all this by hand!). Use the frosting between your two cakes and to ice the top. Decorate with some more walnuts.

Store the cake in the fridge. Unless you’re going to eat the whole thing immediately, of course 🙂

It was the first time I’d tried this recipe but the results are brilliant. It’s delicious. I made a little too much cream cheese frosting and I’ve been eating a slice with an extra scoop of the frosting. Yum!

Are we talking about Bake Off now or Not Going Out? If the former, I think I missed the first couple of series. Not Going Out: I keep seeing on reruns in bits and pieces. I think I’ve seen most episodes but there are gaps in my viewing. It’s always great when it’s on and you come across an episode you’ve never seen before. I’m also ridiculously fond of the theme tune. Not sure why! 🙂

Those cakes are amazing! And I thought I did well make on in the shape of a simple car for my son’s birthday. Some of the things they make on Bake Off are truly amazing. I’d be alright the first two weeks with cake and biscuits, but as soon as we had to bake bread, I’d be sent packing… Maybe if they’re still making it in 20 years’ time when I’ve had more practice 🙂

The last piece went today. It’s been one of the most popular ones I’ve made this year in my house at least 🙂 I’m almost glad we don’t have Thanksgiving here. Only because if we did I wouldn’t stop eating from then until after Christmas! 🙂

Very nice. Just the right amount of dense and chewy. I would say that it tastes more of banana than, in my opinion, a carrot cake should. So while Mary Berry’s recipe describes it as simply “carrot cake”, I’d probably tell people it was banana and carrot cake – although that sounds like it would be horrible, when actually it’s delicious!